


two places: here and where you are

by thehandsingsweapon



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: M/M, interludes, plotless fluffy thing, sense8 inspired
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-03-29
Packaged: 2018-09-25 18:47:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9838706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehandsingsweapon/pseuds/thehandsingsweapon
Summary: a dancer in paris. a musician in london.a soldier in almaty. a thief in moscow.a hockey player in vancouver. a detective in los angeles.an actor in bangkok. a chess prodigy in seoul.their lives are connected somehow and they exist in all kinds of places; here and where 'we' are. little interludes, drabbles even, of our heroes sharing space, sharing time, sharing minds, sharing hearts.or: because i love these skaters and i love sense8 and i have responsibilities to shirk, god/damnit./





	1. to hear you knocking at my door

**Author's Note:**

> holiday binge-thinking-about-all-the-shows-sim-loves yes. start a new fic before you finish the sprawling other one while listening to your kodaline playlist. great idea way to go such eros

Viktor is feeling lonely in Paris the first time it happens. _Lonely,_ in _Paris._ He’s just been admitted into the École de danse de l'Opéra national de Paris and he can literally count the other non-French dancers on one hand. He speaks French, badly, if the unimpressed faces around him mean anything. That’s a revelation, too: in St. Petersburg he was always the best in his studio; enough to earn praise and derision from Lilia Baranovskaya time and time and time again.

After a month he’s starting to think the unimpressed faces are because even now everyone is thinking about a spot at the Opera Ballet, and he’s the foreign prodigy, the competition.

He’s in the studio by himself and it’s either very late or it’s very early, depending on your perspective, and as he stretches he imagines he can hear the sound of someone tuning up an acoustic guitar. Viktor’s mother is a classical violinist and one of his favorite sounds on earth is the coming to life of the orchestra before the symphony, so this little memory makes him smile as he warms up. He forgets to put music on. Soon he thinks he’s imagining idle arpeggios and the gentle twang of chords and the warm honey of the guitar gets him through his warm up.

He’s working on choreographing a new routine, just on his own; here, so far, the teachers don’t know him well enough to let him show his own work. They’ve been giving him assignments. He ought to remember the song he’s set it to, but the guitar melody in his head is so clear and it fits so easily that he doesn’t think of his phone or the wireless speaker he’s brought. He twirls and he leaps and it’s not until he hears a voice, gentle and soft and seemingly trying to be quiet that he stops:

He’s not in the studio anymore. He’s in a — a practice room, he thinks, because it’s tiny and there’s an upright piano shoved against one wall and the floors are wooden under his feet. The light overhead is a bit strident. In front of him is a young man with dark, pillow-mussed hair, still in his pajamas, blinking owlishly from behind his blue-framed glasses.

Suddenly they’re both back in the studio, the stranger with his guitar, and Viktor, and for the life of him he can’t figure out why he’s in two places at once or what to say.

“I am dreaming,” says Yuuri Katsuki, who hadn’t been able to sleep in the first place before he’d finally gone stir-crazy in his dorm, and wandered down to the practice rooms for relief. He’s a music major and he’s not really supposed to be writing silly pop songs like this, off of just a handful of chords and his ever-anxious heart, but sometimes he can’t stop the urge.

“Sorry,” says Viktor, who reaches over to pinch Yuuri, makes him jump out of his chair and back into the wall. “I don’t think so.”

All Yuuri wants is for it to _stop_ and the whole thing’s over almost before it begins, Viktor alone in the studio, Yuuri alone with his guitar and a piano in a room that can’t be more than six feet square.

The both of them go outside and check the hallways just in case.

 

\- - -

 

Otabek Altin has just finished basic training when it happens to him. He’s eighteen years old and somehow he’s been selected for the Republican Guard. They say he’s a natural talent with a rifle, and he’s yet to be beaten in his unit’s boxing class.

It’s the boxing he’s working on, hands taped up, working out with the bag, and he goes from feeling warm and sweaty to feeling slightly chilled in an instant.

Yuri Plisetsky is on the run through the back alleys of Moscow, because he’s just been caught picking pockets at the train station and he damn well intends to make it back with the night’s score: a watch he’s knicked off of a foreigner and the wallet and passport, too. He’s well away from the tourist who gave chase, thankfully; quick and agile, good at climbing up to rooftops and kicking his way over fences. He’s back to his shitty neighborhood, thinking about where he can fence the watch when three other clowns looking to start something bump into him on the street.

They’re a known entity, these morons, and he’s always been able to rely on speed to get away, but he’s a little tired now and the first punch takes him by surprise. _Fuckin’ fairy_ one of them grunts, some smart-ass remark about his hair. Yuri knows life would be easier if he’d just cut it, but he doesn’t want to, and anyway it’s none of their fucking business.

He tastes copper on his mouth and suddenly he’s in a gym and there’s a man in a military undercut doing to a boxing bag what he’d really like to be doing to those fools in Moscow.

Otabek’s been listening to him run without thinking about it, and when the second punch comes he catches it without thinking, except it’s a big fist in Yuri’s small hand.

_Allow me?_

_I wish you would._

Later, Yuri’s the only one still standing in that particular alleyway, and he darts off before they all decide that performance — the duck, the jab, the perfect hook — is something he’s going to be able to repeat.

Back in Almaty, Otabek eyes the boxing bag, decides he’s had enough.

He feels like he’s been fighting a real person this whole time, and in spite of the protest of his limbs, he’s got this strange, inexplicable urge to go for a run.


	2. never let the pressure overpower the fun

Yuri Plisetsky fences the watch at a pawn shop, tosses the passport in his _for a rainy day_ lockbox back home, tells his grandfather that everything was fine. Later he stops in at the corner store, buys the box of cheap cat food, walks down the street to leave cans unopened for the strays that catch rats.

Yuri would be an alleycat himself it wasn’t for his grandfather. He sympathizes. He’s got a friend from around the neighborhood, Mila, and she’s too pretty for her own good, has a father who’s a drunk. Yuri knows what happens to alleycats because he knows Mila; Mila who still smiles, who wears extra makeup now and who, lately, has bought an awful lot of skin-tight dresses.

“The mathematical probability of you ever climbing out of poverty at this rate is close to zero.” He’s being watched by an Asian kid with a stone-cold, sour face, the sort who’s too neat to be here, in the shittiest part of Moscow, wearing a shirt with some boxy script that Yuri can’t read but knows instinctively, from some place outside of himself, can only be Korean.

Yuri actually stops and tries to give that the right amount of consideration, though he’s never been any good at numbers. He shrugs, looks up at the sky. It’s an overcast night. No hope of stars.

Still, this is home. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

 _Isn’t it?_ Seung-gil wonders, from a Seoul high-rise. Behind him the blonde gives a low, speculative whistle, looking out at the shine of the city. “Maybe I’ll move in with you,” he jokes, walking across the spotless hardwood floors in his grimy sneakers. Seung-gil tries not to wince.

“My parents’ house,” he murmurs instead, and glances down at a side table, where there’s a chess set still waiting: the game he’s played with his father every morning and every evening. They exchange moves when they move to and from the house; the arrow on the post-it note currently points to _black_ which means it’s his turn. A wry glance down confirms his suspicions about the relative weaknesses of the white bishop, which he claims, before spinning the post-it back to the proper place.

“You’ve still got room,” says Yuri, who’s been sleeping on a couch since he was twelve. He sits down at the table, picks up one of the knights. Seung-gil nearly tells him not to. _Don’t get comfortable,_ he nearly wants to say.

Except what good is it, talking to a stranger, some imaginary Russian fairy, wrapped up in street-slime, dropped off in his living room?

He’s not _really_ here. This isn’t _really_ happening, in Moscow, in Seoul.

Yet here they are: talking.

“Do you play?”

“I do,” Yuri confirms for him. His Grandfather loves chess, plays in speed rounds in the park. Yuri knows all the tricks, the traps. Russians are proud of this game. “You wanna get your ass beat?”

Seung-gil, who is currently the best chess player in all of South Korea, a _prodigy,_ they’ve said, since he was seven, looks at the blonde and almost smiles. “The mathematical probability —“

“Tch. Shut up and sit down.”

 

\- - -

Ji Guang Hong and Leo de la Iglesia are roommates, because of _course_ they are, they’ve known each other since they were eight years old, going to elementary school in the sprawl of Los Angeles. Leo de la Iglesia is the boy who befriended Guang Hong back then, when Guang Hong’s family had _just_ relocated from Hong Kong. Kids back then had told Guang Hong he had an accent, _spoke funny,_ that his name was weird; Leo, on the other hand, hadn’t seemed to notice. He wanted to know about China, which was so far away, across the vastness of the Pacific, and with all the innocence of an uninformed child had simply stared and then asked _have you seen the Great Wall?_

They’ve been best friends ever since.

Now they’re paying too much rent on a lousy apartment, going through _police training,_ which was Leo’s idea, actually. Leo, who just wants a steady gig that’ll give him insurance until his band makes it big (he’s a drummer). Guang Hong goes along with it. Guang Hong spent too much of his childhood watching bad Hong Kong detective dramas. Some part of Guang Hong still entertains the idea of becoming an actor someday, like that. He’s narrated whole stories for Leo about how someday he’s going to be writing up a traffic citation for some movie producer who gets into a fender bender, which happens all the damn time in this town, just last week someone cited a Kardashian, and the rest will be history.

Some of the other cadets think he’s too petite to be a police officer. Now it’s not about his accent or even his name. _Babyface,_ someone calls him in the gym once, and they egg him on over and over again until Guang Hong has to react; until someone is looking up at him from their back on the mat.

Guang Hong doesn’t look like it but he’s been studying taijiquan since he was a child, still practices with his Grandfather, on Sunday mornings, out in the park.

Leo plays peacemaker after that. Of course he does. He’s Leo.

When one of the older cops shows up with a spare set of tickets to this week’s L.A. Kings game, Leo springs on them, because he’s a big hockey fan. It’s a ridiculous improbability, that. Even Guang Hong knows that Leo’s household only has two religions: the Catholic Church, and World Cup Soccer, and yet somehow Leo knows all there is to know about the latest trades.

 _Vancouver’s called Leroy up from the minors,_ he tells Guang Hong while they change in the locker room. He’s got a spare Kings shirt, which he’s made Guang Hong wear. _When in Rome._ They’re in LA. It smells a little bit like Leo, Guang Hong notes, almost absently, while he puts it on, and it’s a little too big for him, but they used to do this as kids, too, and sometimes he pretends like he hasn’t noticed when he grabs Leo’s windbreaker instead of his before he leaves the house in a rainstorm. _Canadian kid. He used to play for University of Denver but decided to try to go pro a year early. They’ve had him in development._

The name sounds vaguely familiar but Guang Hong doesn’t place it until he gets to the arena, loses himself in the pattern of warmup, of practice shots on the goalie, almost feels like he’s making passes and slapshots _himself._ He zones out so much that Leo has to snap fingers in front of his face. _Earth to Guang Hong,_ he says, _are you there?_ Guang Hong makes an excuse about being tired, settles in to watch the game. Leo’s more engrossed this time, says little except when he disagrees with the referees (and even then, sometimes, he says it in Spanish, which Guang Hong is not really meant to understand, but of course he does by now; he’s had entirely too much exposure to Leo’s family, and he pays too much attention).

There’s a certain elegance to it, Guang Hong will admit. The way the skates carve up the ice. The finesse it must take to handle the puck. Brutality too: the force of those bone-rattling collisions, for instance, or the sheer, chaotic speed.

Jean-Jacques Leroy scores his first NHL goal, playing on the third line of the Vancouver Canucks, eight minutes and thirty-two seconds into the second period. Guang Hong Ji makes himself look like a right idiot by standing up in his Kings jersey and shouting at the top of his lungs. He does it because for a moment _he’d_ been there, he’d seen the opportunity coming off of the rebound of the goalie’s pads, knew just how to aim for top-shelf. He makes the _JJ-Style_ hand symbol, too, and then Leo’s looking at him like he’s grown a second head:

“I didn’t know you were a hockey fan.”

Jean-Jacques is there with them, in full gear, which makes no sense whatsoever, because Jean-Jacques is sitting back on the bench, off of his line rotation, listening to his coach.

“So you’re the cop,” says JJ, who is _significantly_ taller than Guang Hong in all his gear; in the skates, the pads, the helmet. He looks like a giant, from this perspective. “You don’t look like a cop.”

“I get that a lot,” Guang Hong mumbles, and Leo blinks back. JJ is back in the game already; vanished from the immediate vicinity like a ghost.

“You okay there?”

 _God_ , it’s hard talking to two people at once. Guang Hong decides to play stupid. It’s sarge who always tells them that usually if a thing is too good to be true, it is. Anyway Jean-Jacques is looking back at the game, now, his eye on a Defenseman who clocked him one back in the first. “… Sorry, I got confused.”

After the game, though, he follows his instincts again, stumbles into a karaoke bar with Leo, runs right into Leroy again. _Too excited to sleep,_ says Jean-Jacques. He proceeds to murder a rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, but they get a selfie with him later, and even Leo accepts an autograph reluctantly.

 _Proof,_ he insists, though it was Guang Hong who thought he needed that.

Proof that in the morning he won’t have made this all up.  
  
"Hey," says Jean-Jacques, when they're leaving to stumble back home, Leo's arm thrown over his shoulders, "good meeting you face-to-face."  
  
Leo doesn't get it, but Guang Hong knows what he meant:  _in person._


End file.
